How to: Install Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 Offline

Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 is now available for download. You’ll find that only a web installer is provided, which means you need to be online to install it as it acquires the necessary packages for your installed product at installation time.

But don’t fret if you need to download Update 1 for ease of installation in a VM, or on a disconnected machine. The web installer for Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 (vsupdate_KB2707250.exe) has built-in functionality to create your own local copy of the full update (one size fits all – Express, Pro, Test Pro, Premium, and Ultimate).

To create a local copy of Update, save the web installer locally. Then open a command prompt at that location and run the EXE with the /layout switch.

This will launch an interactive experience where you can designate the Download Location (by default, your My Documents folder).

Click Download and the installer will then acquire all of the packages and save them to the designated folder. You can even watch each category flash by on the screen as it downloads.

Once it’s complete, you get the all clear message that looks like this:

Go to the folder you designated earlier, and you can find all the files you need to install Update 1 offline:

Remember, this is the full update. It has everything for updating Visual Studio 2012 IDE products and Test Professional.

You can now burn a DVD (almost 1 GB), create an ISO for use with a VM, or copy the folder structure to a portable drive. Be sure you copy both the EXE and the Packages folder from this download location. This version of the EXE will look for the packages locally instead of online.

This process works with most of the Visual Studio 2012 web installers, too. If you choose to download a Visual Studio 2012 product, chances are you’re running a build of the web installer with the /layout switch hard coded into it.

@Josh – We do not have a way to slipstream the updates with the RTM installer. It's something we are looking into for the future, especially with a faster pace of updates. What we planned is for each VSUpdate to be cumulative. What this means is that after VSUpdate 2 is released, you'll only have to install VSUpdate 2 to update a machine that doesn't have VSUpdate 1 installed. You will not have to install VSUpdate 1 and then VSUpdate 2… so it'll be like slipstreaming all the updates together.

The Installation procedure ask for ..packagesvc_librarycorecab8.cab. But cab8 does not exists in that folder.

What to do next?

@WorstCase – I'm not sure how you're running your installation, but if you download the full update using the procedure outlined in the post above, you'll have a copy of cab8.cab in the /packages/vc_librarycore folder.

What i don't understand is why you didnt simply put a full update available to download. Why we have to execute de update with the /layout command to download it manually.

I hope you are aware that in business company, we don't want to download the update x100 times from the internet but only 1 time and distribute it to our team internally.

Thank you for the update but i hope you will revise how you distribute your updates in the future 🙂

@Alexandre – In our experience, large ISO files have a high incidence of download failure. The /layout option enables you to successfully download all the bits by making many small file transfers instead of one large file transfer. You can then create your own local ISO for internal use.

There used to be a full offline package for updates. Life was simple then. It seems like the way things are installed changes daily. Thanks at least for the /layout command. Mayby next version will use apt get.

But my proxy settings require me to provide a password manually. And this installer does not bring up the dialogue box to do that!

-Thanks for the reply..

@DJ – I'm not sure how to trigger a proxy dialog box when running this. I would expect it'd be automatic. I suggest posting in this forum where more people who may be familiar with your problem can answer.

@Andre – About picking up updates from a folder at install time. It’s something we are looking at. Another alternative we are looking at is providing a fully slipstreamed product, which would be able to update existing installs, or install on a clean machine. This would actually be simpler and provide the same capability.

@Josh – About downloading experiences. I appreciate your feedback, these are all enhancements we would like to do in the future. We should have the download size on the download location page, since we know we are downloading everything. We do show the size required to install, including download, during install of VSUpdate.

About a private feed for the VSUpdates. We don’t have that capability at this time. What you can do to manage the rollout a bit more is to turn off the update notification system (see the Tools/Option for Updates and Extensions), and then roll out the updates via internal software delivery tools.

@Andre – About picking up updates from a folder at install time. It’s something we are looking at. Another alternative we are looking at is providing a fully slipstreamed product, which would be able to update existing installs, or install on a clean machine. This would actually be simpler and provide the same capability.

@Josh – About downloading experiences. I appreciate your feedback, these are all enhancements we would like to do in the future. We should have the download size on the download location page, since we know we are downloading everything. We do show the size required to install, including download, during install of VSUpdate.

About a private feed for the VSUpdates. We don’t have that capability at this time. What we expect is that teams who want to manage the rollout a bit more will turn off the update notification system, and then roll out the updates via internal software delivery tools.

Thanks for the tip but we will be unable to install the update. Our development machines do not have access to the Internet and our production machines are locked down so that we do not execute foreign code. So unless there is another way to just download the packages my department will have to remain at the vanilla VS2012.

@Dave – I'm guessing you can ask your IT department to go through the steps and place Update 1 on an internal share.

There seems to be a problem on my end as I am unable to complete the download. The message came back that it was looking for the Preparation.exe. This brings me to my question. Am I required to have Visual Studio 2012 loaded on the machine I am attempting the download from?

Thanks

@Hatch – preparation.exe is one of the files downloaded into the layout. Are you seeing this after using /layout, or when running vsupdate_KB2707250.exe in the downloaded layout?

"@Alexandre – In our experience, large ISO files have a high incidence of download failure. The /layout option enables you to successfully download all the bits by making many small file transfers instead of one large file transfer. You can then create your own local ISO for internal use."

Hmm – Well you better tell the rest of Microsoft and the MSDN team about your findings because everything else (including VS2012) is available via ISO downloads for MSDN subscribers…

I try to try it on W8 to go machine… Is any way to set the instalation path? The VisualStudio is installed just the must on C, the rest on another drive. This update at first attempt took 5 GB from C, and on a 30 GB drive with the operating system got the free space at 1 GB not enough for anything

@MrSmersh – There is a /CustomInstallPath switch. That might be an option. I haven't tried it.

The installer seems to be extremely inefficient at pulling small files down. It looks like they are pulled serially. My connection is capable of pulling iso's from MSDN at 4MiB/s end to end. But this installer I'm lucky to average 100KiB/s over a minute. It's 4MiB/s here and there, but it looks like just long enough to pull some of the larger files.

I don't understand the comment about high incidence of failures pulling iso's. I can't remember once in 5 years where I've had a failed or corrupt iso download, especially from MSDN subscriber downloads. If it really is a problem, why not provide the files in a more reliable solid container like rar which allows some corruption recovery data to be embedded. The chatty and inefficient file by file download system hardly seems warranted.

when trying to install this both with the /layout and without it it gets stuck after sometime with an "Unable to locate pacakge source" message

[Original installer path]packageskb2744908KB2744908.msp"

When I choose download from the internet it tries again and returns to this message. I made sure that it downloaded some 100 MB before this message. Has anyone else encountered this error ? How can I continue the download ?

Thank's for informations. Can you share to combine update 1 into ISO file ?

@Cecep – After you finish running the download of the Update 1 layout, you can create an ISO file based on the resulting folder structure using software that came with your CD/DVD writer, or by using any of a number of free utilities (e.g., File2ISO) you can find online.

It fails to retrieve Cab8 for me as well. I see the problem on 2 different machines. It fails both with and without /layout. One machine has 2008 Server R2 and the other has Windows 7 Pro. Both are 64 bit machines with VS 2010 as well as VS 2012 on them. It retrieves the first 7 Cabs just fine and then when it looks for Cab 8 it goes immediately to prompt for source:

I have been trying for days to download these files. If you put them in an iso file in the MSDN subscriber downloads then at least we can pause and restart the download. This does not have the option to pause and restart. There are some of us who for some reason or another, have to have the ability to pause and restart the downloads.

I am one of those that had difficulties in downloading the iso files. Since the ability to pause and restart was added, I have been able to limit the number of times that I have to restart the download of files.

Not having the ability to pause ans restart the download, I doubt that I will ever be able to successfully get these files.

What is up with all the negativity in the comments? I ran the update with the /layout option and went to lunch. Came back and the files were downloaded. This is MUCH more preferable in my opinion as I don't have to extract the files from the ISO to put them on a network share for easier installation on systems that support natively mounting an ISO.

So in short – a VERY BIG THANK YOU for improving the update experience with each release of Visual Studio. I do very much look forward to a "slip streaming" method in the future (like Office does with the Updates folder).

@Goyuix – I'm happy to hear that. It's just not in our online nature to provide accolades when things work, because we expect things to do so. I'm equally guilty of usually only posting to other companies when I'm having issues, and not when it just works as it should. Wheels that don't need oil, don't squeak. 🙂

This approach fails just as running vsupdate_KB2707250.exe directly fails for me. I'm assuming this is because I'm behind a proxy. vsupdate_KB2707250.exe fails saying it is unable to locate a package. vsupdate_KB2707250.exe /layout fails "Install cannot continue because some required components failed."

Why not simply supply an .iso? Why must users produce an .iso themselves?

Just a quick note: Are you aware that Update 1 only includes the english (ENU) version of the "Entity Framework Designer" (EFTools.msi)? I tested it with the german version of VS2012 and Update 1 replaces the originally german version with an updated english one. Will this be fixed in update 2?

I've followed the directions and have the packages. But one one machine when I launch the installer, it just shows a splash screen for a split second and exits. No messages, nothing. The only thing on that machine that I can think of is that VS2012 is installed on drive D due to lack of space on drive C? Any ideas?

For those experiencing the ''Unable to locate package source" message;

1) Follow the procedure above to download the Update 1 install files locally using the /layout switch. I did this at home and burned a DVD because it did not work from within our company network (you do not need Visual Studio installed to do this).

2) Successful installation of Update 1 was only achieved in conjunction with updating the Nuget Package Manager from within VS 2012 Tools > Extensions & Updates

Hard to believe you can't simply download an update1 iso file to install this from. Using the /layout switch does not work behind a proxy with user credentials. So I must download this at home, burn a DVD, bring it to work, and install. Not sure why this update is limited, but MS should provide multiple methods for updates as they do with other products.